HeyWe! Family – an app to organize the family; group messaging, shared calendar & locator

HeyWe! Family is a clever little application with lots of functionality. Blending a messaging app, a calendar-sharing and schedule app and a geo-location service, the app is perhaps the ultimate in family organisation tool. The idea is all members sign into the service and join the family group. Each member can then view and edit calendar entries, post notices, send private messages and view the locations of other family members. A comprehensive organisation tool, wrapped in a cute and family-friendly-UI, it could be the solution for family organisation you’re looking for.

Price: Free for a 30 days trial, then subscription service for whole family; ~$2/monthly, ~$10/annual.

Pros & Cons:

Family organisation app including: group messaging, shared calendar, and locate a family member!

Post notes for all members to see!

Family-friendly, easy-to-use interface!

Lots of functionality, and more to come!

Nice design!

Cons

Nice to have, but other free apps achieve the same results.

Doesn’t sync with other calendars, such as Google.

Geo-location doesn’t pick up locations.

Features:

Organizing a family of any size can be a challenge. Ensuring appointments are met, birthdays remembered, children collected and shopping items remembered are all the kind of things that might get forgotten without organisation and the occasional prompting. To keep a family running smoothly, especially in a time where many have smartphones, HeyWe! Family is a great solution to keep everyone connected.

HeyWe! Family is really several applications in one. Firstly, it’s a calendar app. You can post events to the calendar and include family members with notifications. These events can also be repeated and you can create alerts to remind people. It’s also a private messaging app. There’s a section just for messages and you can PM anyone in the family group quickly, easily and for free. There is also a geo-location feature. If the family are all coming together from different locations, or you want to ensure a family member will arrive at an event on time, or perhaps if you just need to know where a member is (the voluntary). Now, during my testing this didn’t work at all- the app just couldn’t locate me where other apps; Google Maps, Glympse, Foursquare all could within a couple of seconds, but if the feature is tweaked it will be a fine addition.

The functionality is set to develop further however, and users can look forward to picture sharing and also the added security of a panic button. These factors, along with a working geo-location tool and added stability could certainly make the app a worthwhile long-term investment. As it is right now, I felt that if you assembled Glympse, Google Calendar and Google Talk you would pretty much have the same thing, albeit with better Android integration. Currently, HeyWe! family is standalone and doesn’t sync with Google services.

Usefulness:

For keeping track of family, appointments and responsibilities, HeyWe! Family is a small Swiss-Army Knife of an app which incorporates geo-location, messaging and calendar organisation. If all these features were to work (geo-location is currently not functioning) and you were then able to add the panic button and picture sharing to the equation, you will have an extremely useful and unique service.

Ease of Use:

The app is designed so that adults and children alike should be able to use it. On that basis, if you have a smartphone, this shouldn’t be too taxing to use. The UI is simply laid out and intuitive.

Frequently Used:

If fully embraced, this is the kind of app each family member would use on a daily basis.

Interface:

The interface is quite cutesy and family-friendly, with pastel colours and rounded edges. In many ways it looks a little like an early-education app that probably suits the younger members of the family rather than the adults. However, it’s well designed and perfectly laid out for convenient use.

AndroidTapp.com Rating

(3.9 out of 5)

Should you Download HeyWe! Family? HeyWe! Family is a simple to use app that packs in plenty of features you might otherwise use several apps for. It works well most of the time, although the geo-location functionality doesn’t seem to work at all. However, I genuinely think the app has bags of potential with more features to be added. The app is free to download and trial for 30 days, after which there is a subscription service. Definitely give the app a go if you require something to help with family organisation.

1 Comment

I agree with your review. The app has tons of potential but at the moment there are some kinks as you mentioned. However with that said, the app seems to run great on my girlfriends iPhone. Hopefully new versions will be made available with the location feature fixed, although it is not the feature I would subscribe for because I’m currently using the app with just my girlfriend.
I can see that families would want to keep track of their children with the map tracker, and not having to call them every hour or so.

Overall I don’t agree with your con that other free apps will do the tricks that the different features are doing. I strongly believe that the strong-suite of an app like HeyWe is that people can do the things within one app, i.e. the whole is greater than the sum of its parts!